Panama: A Novel [Paperback]

Eric Zencey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 7, 2001

A national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Panama marks the debut of an impressive literary talent. It is part detective novel, part historical thriller...and it all begins in 1892 when a woman vanishes and a corpse is found. Gunshots echo in the Paris streets. Blood flows to the Panama Canal...

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is that extremely rare find, a first novel that is not only extremely accomplished but also quite unlike anything else. It daringly places a real person?American historian and philosopher Henry Adams?into a historic situation?the scandal in 1892 Paris over the corrupt collapse of the grand Panama Canal plan?and makes of it a dashing, sometimes touching and, yes, thoughtful thriller. Adams is sketched quickly and deftly: enterprising, sensitive, observant, still mourning the suicide of his wife years earlier, half in love with beautiful Elizabeth Cameron. We see him briefly in Panama, stealing a picture that will come to be significant; at Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (naturally), where he is much taken with a young American painter, Miriam, who seems like a new breath in his life, and to whom he becomes quickly, quixotically attached; finally in Paris, where Miriam instantly disappears, is perhaps dead. At once, Adams begins to search for her, becoming involved with Parisian police, including a fledgling fingerprint expert and his young nephew; a coroner is killed, a macabre gift arrives for Adams via a pneumatique and the political plot around the Panama scandal, which could bring down a government and create a new one, thickens. At the heart of it all, Adams barges ahead like a gallant detective with the mind of an aesthete; through his eyes Paris, on the brink of the modern age, has never seemed stranger or more alluring, its people more enigmatic. That Zencey can create a headlong read, with a piercing climax and a poignant final note, out of such esoteric material is almost miraculous. A wonderful debut. 100,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In 1892, Henry Adams, distinguished historian and descendant of two presidents, is in Paris, where he finds himself embroiled in several mysteries: a charming woman attracts him on the beach, then disappears and is, or isn't, killed. Jacques de Reinach, a major figure in the failed French effort to build a Panama canal, dies by suicide or murder. An American senator's wife seems to be trying to change her longstanding relationship with Adams from friendship to something else. A trusted friend is hiding knowledge of a dead woman. Adams is drawn into an intrigue of scandal, bribery, murder, corruption, and sex. He can't resist searching for the missing woman. Along the way he, and we, learn a lot about French politics, the nature of history and experience, love, loss, and forensic science. This outstanding first novel is highly recommended for its intelligence, characterization, suspense, and setting. [A BOMC and Quality Paperback selection.]-Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
--Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Trade (August 7, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425178331
• ISBN-13: 978-0425178331
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,363,949 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining historical mystery, December 16, 1999

By 

Roger Lee - See all my reviews

This review is from: Panama (Mass Market Paperback)

I read this book several months ago and so I don't remember all the details of it. I do remember that it was a very enjoyable read. The plot is very clever and complex, the characters are interesting and well defined, and there is some action and suspense in some parts. The best thing about this book is its atmosphere; you really feel transported to late nineteenth century Paris. I wouldn't say that it was an outstanding novel, but it definately deserves a lot more than the one star some reviewers gave it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent literary thriller., July 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Panama (Mass Market Paperback)

As you will see from many of the customer reviews, this historical thriller is not a purely plot-driven page-turner, a la Robert Ludlum or Ken Follett. If that is what you are looking for, you will be disappointed. Rather, the author takes the time (and, yes, forces the reader to do so) setting a mood, at the same time capturing the spirit of the age and the tormented inner spirit of the protagonist (Henry Adams). This is first and foremost a book about Adams' emotional recovery, so, no, it is not as fast-paced and action-packed as The Alienist. (I liked both books very much, but they are different--perhaps the marketers are at fault for raising false expectations.) But, so long as you are willing to savor a mood, and to arrive slowly at your destination, this is an excellent read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars a most unlikely hero, July 6, 2001

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Panama (Hardcover)

I think men are by nature either Mont-Saint Michelians [the Cathedral] or, if you will, Virginians

[the Virgin Mary]. ... Either they see the protection of the collectivity as absolutely crucial or they see the collectivity as being justified only because it serves the development of individual moral excellence. So you have the basic question: What is one's social duty? The survival of the group or individual moral integrity? Reason of state or personal honor? -Henry Adams, Panama

I suppose you have to admire Eric Zencey's courage in making Henry Adams the hero of a thriller. Adams was, after all, an intellectual, best known for not becoming President of the United States--as his grandfather and great-grandfather had--and for his autobiography, which mainly dwells on the lack of great truths for his generation to believe in. These elements and the fact that the story occurs while Adams is still recovering from the suicide of his wife, Clover, combine to make him a most unlikely protagonist for a mystery.

The story places Adams in Paris in 1892, the period during which he was working on his great Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres A Study of Thirteenth Century Unity. On a visit to Chartres he meets and is captivated by Miriam Talbott, a young American painter. When her body purportedly washes up near the quai de Valmy, Adams is called on to identify the corpse, but it is not the woman that he met. He subsequently becomes involved in the scandal surrounding the failure of the French Panama Canal Company, which threatens to destroy the reputations of men like Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, and Gustave Eiffel, and even to bring down the French government. Meanwhile, Adams's friend John Hay may or may not be mixed up in the whole mess, though it is certain that he wants the United States to take over the building of the canal.

Zencey does a fine job of evoking the time and the place of the mystery. The blend of fiction and history does not seem forced, and some other interesting historical characters crop up, including Georges Clemenceau and Alphonse Bertillon, who helped popularize the use of fingerprints, which play a key role in the story. But the very ambivalence--about himself, his times, the truth, etc.--for which Adams is famous, finally makes him an unsatisfactory hero. Even the most psychically damaged detectives in fiction have typically been driven either, like Sherlock Holmes, by a certainty that mystery will yield to reason, or, like Sam Spade, by a personal code of honor, or, like Batman, by a burning desire to see justice done. Adams does not have sufficient faith in reason, honor, or justice to be motivated by any of them, he just seems to want to know what happened to the girl with whom he has become irrationally infatuated. Because we do not share this emotional attachment, the mystery is not as involving as it should be.

Instead, the pleasures of the book lie mostly in Zencey's development of Adams's ideas and the portrait of his character.

Adams knew. But how could he answer? To a mind as evenly divided as his--a mind, his brother Brooks had warned him, that would never find a place in politics, where simplicity of vision was required; a mind to which evil never seemed unmixed with good, nor good unalloyed with evil; one to which no object appeared important enough to call our strength of action, nor absolutely necessary enough not to allow that its absence just might be possible to accommodate--to such a mind, the only accurate answer to bluntness was contradiction: yes and no.

This description of Adams's mind is similar to that offered by Louis Menand of some of the other key figures from that generation--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr; William James, etc.--in his book The Metaphysical Club (see Orrin's review). One can't help but be saddened that this scion of the family that led the fight for American Independence (John Adams) and against Slavery (John Quincy Adams) succumbed to this kind of banal moral relativism.

GRADE : C+